


Cookies and Competitions

by artimus13



Category: Persona 5
Genre: All the Thieves are there just briefly, Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff, I'm Bad At Tagging, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-30
Updated: 2020-09-30
Packaged: 2021-03-08 01:42:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,458
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26727610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/artimus13/pseuds/artimus13
Summary: “Hey Goro, wanna help me bake some cookies?”It all started with that one innocent question that Akira had asked, and little did Goro know, his reply would lead to a lot more than simply baking cookies with the former Phantom Thief.orAkira realizes Goro has never baked chocolate chip cookies, and he sets out to fix it with a little competition.
Relationships: Akechi Goro/Kurusu Akira, Akechi Goro/Persona 5 Protagonist, Niijima Makoto/Okumura Haru
Comments: 3
Kudos: 55





	Cookies and Competitions

“Hey Goro, wanna help me bake some cookies?”

It all started with that one innocent question that Akira had asked, and little did Goro know, his reply would lead to a lot more than simply baking cookies with the former Phantom Thief.

“I don’t know why you’re asking in the first place. My last cooking excursion nearly burnt down our entire apartment, and that was quite the feat since I merely put some rice into a rice cooker.” 

He had been lucky Akira had been there to help him put out the mini fire that had started from their cheap rice cooker. It may have been cheap, but it still had settings, so how was Goro supposed to know that there were different temperatures and cook times depending on the amount of rice in the cooker. He had simply put the rice in and put it up to the highest temperature so that it would cook fast. In hindsight, and after Akira had explained how to properly use a rice cooker, it was a very foolish mistake he had made. 

“Besides, I’ve never baked cookies before, so along with my lack of cooking skills, I’m sure I would only hinder and not help you.”

Akira stopped getting out the ingredients for making cookies, and he looked at Goro with something that was a mix of shock and sadness.

“Wait so you're telling me that Goro Akechi who used to be the darling Detective Prince of Tokyo, and who also ran a food blog of all things, has never baked cookies before?”

“No of course not. When would I have slotted in baking cookies into my schedule of being a hitman, faking said detective prince persona, and planning out my revenge. It’s not like I had a wealth of freetime at my disposal.”

“You always had time to...let me think,” Akira racked his brain for all of the things he and Goro had done while he was still a Phantom Thief. “You always seemed to have time to play billiards with me, play darts with me, and go to the jazz club with me”

“And what’s the one constant in all of those situations?” Goro asked.

“All of them are locations in Kichijoji?” Akira said teasingly.

“I know you’re not that dense. The constant was of course you. We had quite the rivalry during those years, and I quite enjoyed your company. However, I suppose both of those things are still true now.” 

Yes, they did still have a bit of a rivalry going even though they lived together. It was nothing like their rivalry back then, but small things like playing on the dart board that they had purchased for their small apartment or seeing who could come up with the better date spots for the both of them to try out. 

“Aww honey you flatter me,” Akira said, returning from the kitchen to the living room and giving Goro a kiss on the head, “but we still have the same problem as what we started with.”

“I really don’t see a problem. It’s just simply baking cookies. What could I possibly be missing out on?”

Akira looked like he was about to argue back that: yes there was a problem with never having the experience of ‘simply baking cookies’, but in that moment Goro only saw Akira pull his phone out of his pocket and started to make some text to a certain group of people. 

***

A little less than a week later, Goro and Akira found themselves in front of Haru’s, excessively large in Goro’s opinion, mansion. He doesn’t really know why they are here. He only knows that all of the former Phantom Thieves plus Sumire would be here. 

“Akira please explain to me why the hell we are here when we could be having a much more productive Sunday somewhere else.”

It wasn’t that he disliked Akira’s group of friends, he just found them to be irritating more times than not (besides Sumire she was the exception besides Akira of course). This coupled with the fact there was a singer at the Jazz Jin tonight led to Goro wish he were somewhere else with Akira right now. 

Akira, like with the other times Goro had asked, did not answer Goro’s question and only gave him a smirk as he rang the doorbell to be let in. A couple seconds later, Makoto arrived at the door to let them in.

“Oh, Akira, Goro welcome! I think Haru and the others are still preparing things in the kitchen, but they should be done any minute. I am quite looking forward to the competition that you’ve planned, Akira. It’s really a great plan especially since it has been awhile since we’ve all been able to get together.” 

Again, Goro gave Akira a questioning look, but Akira chose to ignore him and answer Makoto. 

“Yeah, I’ve been looking forward to this too. I just hope we don’t start any fires and burn down your’s and Haru’s house.” 

He was about to ask both of them exactly what they were looking forward to, but they reached the kitchen, and he got his answer. 

In front of him, there were two sets of mixing bowls (four in total), chocolate chips among other ingredients, two ovens that seemed to already be preheated, and the rest of the former Phantom Thieves scrambling about to get things like spatulas and measuring utensils in place.

“God dammit Akira,” Goro mumbled mostly to himself, “I thought you had given up the fantasy of me baking.”

“Yes and no,” Akira replied, “I expanded upon my original idea of, in your words, ‘Simply baking cookies”, and I decided to make it a competition of who could make the better cookies.”

“As fun as that sounds, you will clearly win, so why don’t we just…” Goro started, but he got interrupted by Haru, who had noticed her girlfriend’s return, and decided to join the conversation. 

“That’s why it won’t be a competition between the two of you, but it will be one between the four of us!”

The others must have finished the set up for the competition, and Goro must have let the shock show on his face because Haru continued.

“Me and Mako will be baking against you and Akira-kun to see who will be able to make the better cookies.” 

“The only reason you're competin’ together though is cause you totally suck at cooking Akechi,” Ryuji said as he promptly slapped Goro on the back and gave a fist bump to Akira. 

Before Goro could tear Sakamoto apart (not literally of course Goro was mostly past that), Morgana came to his defense. 

“That’s not right! Don’t listen to him Akechi, Akira just wanted to bake the cookies with you rather than against you.” Morgana said in Futaba’s arms. Goro looked over to Akira to confirm this new fact, and he saw a slight blush on his face. 

“And now without further delay I, your lovely MC for the night, declare that we get this baking competition underway!” Futaba declared excitedly.

“Don’t worry Futaba it’s almost time, but we have to explain the rules first or else this wouldn’t be very fair would it,” Makoto interrupted the orange haired girl’s excitement. 

“I’ll be judging the taste of the cookies since I’m a certified sweets expert!” Ann started bubbly explaining, “though I don’t know how good of a judge I’ll be since I mostly like all sweets.”

“I’m sure you’ll do great Ann-senpai!” Sumire followed up Ann with an explanation of what she would be doing. “I’m here to judge the overall quality of the cookies. I can’t say I have as much experience as Ann-senpai has in this category, but I pack pretty good quality lunches for myself for gymnastics practices.”

“And of course, I will be judging the aesthetics of your cookies.” Yusuke finished off. “They must all be perfectly circular, and they must not have a single detail out of place or else it will not be good enough! I want to see you pour yourselves into your cookies and…”

“Can it Inari! You can judge the cookies when the time comes, but now is not the time.” Futaba once again started explaining. “By the way you guys only have about an hour to do all of this, so it’s like one of those really intense cooking shows!”

“This all sounds like multitudes of fun,” Goro would have tried to get out of this, but he knew Akira would force him into it one way or another, like the balck haired trickster did with everything, so he just decided to relent without a fight.

He still had a couple questions though. 

“Why are you here?” he turned and asked Ryuji. He could understand why Morgana was here, for the cat always rotated whose home he stayed at, and the last he remembered the cat decided to lodge with Haru and Makoto, and everyone else here had a role minus Ryuji.

“Geez, you’re just as friendly as ever, and what’s so bad about my company anyways! I’m just here to eat some of the leftover cookies, but there might not be any cause yours’ and Makoto’s cooking skills are super questionable.”

Both people mentioned gave Ryuji a very hard, very strong death glare.

“I’ll prove you wrong.” Makoto said in the most threatening way possible.

“Not like your idiotic cooking skills are much better Sakamoto.” Goro replied with a very icy tone in his voice. 

“Least I can make rice without almost burning an apartment down.”

That only served to make both of the offended bad cooks even more angry at the blond. Akira and Haru went to their respective partner to calm them down and prevent and a possible murder from ocuring. 

“Alright!” Futaba started up for the third time that night. “It’s finally time for Cooking Mama in real life! Get ready to bake some cookies people.”

Both pairs of people headed over to their respective cooking stations and braced themselves for the competition ahead of them. Both of the teams were fairly balanced with Haru and Akira both being very good cooks in general compared to Goro and Makoto who were totally lost on the first thing to do in a kitchen. It balanced out well. 

Morgana started the countdown. “You can all start baking in… 3, 2, 1!”

“Try not to burn the kitchen down!” Futaba and Ryuji yelled at the same time. 

Despite all the rules being told to him and having all the ingredients and materials to make cookies layed out right before him, Goro still didn’t have the slightest clue as to how to make the cookies. Thankfully, Goro had Akira to help him with his lack of knowledge. 

“Alright, it’s showtime!” Akira said in his old Joker style “Goro we need two cups of sugar to put in for the dry ingredients. Can you start adding that to the bowl please?”

“I don’t mind adding it, but what size cup do we need? All of these are varying in sizes.”

He thought he heard Akira chuckle a bit to himself at his cluelessness as he proceeded to grab a measuring utensil.

“Use this one here,” Akira started to explain. “This measures to exactly a cup, so you’ll just need to put two of these into the bowl we have for dry ingredients.” 

“Well thank you for the assistance, however I think I understand how to put sugar into the bowl now.” 

Goro took a large scoop of sugar and went to put it into the bowl only to be immediately stopped by Akira. 

“You do see all that extra sugar on top right?”

“Yes Akira, I do in fact have eyes. Is there a problem with the excess sugar?”

“See that’s the problem. It’ll throw off the measurements if you don’t level it off.”

He watched as Akira grabbed a nearby butter knife and put it into his hand. Akira put his hand on Goro’s hand and guided it so it smoothed off the extra sugar from the top of the cup and put the remainder into the bowl.

“There you go. Good thing you put in the sugar first; our cookies would taste terrible without it” he said, giving Goro a kiss on the cheek. “Now just do that for the other dry ingredients, and once you're done with that, start mixing them together.”

“What will you be working on while I’m doing this?”

“I’m going to be putting all of the wet ingredients into one bowl. We should finish about the same time, and then, we’ll add them both together.”

“I never knew you were such an expert in baking. You always keep managing to surprise me Akira.”

He saw Akira trying to hide the blush that had spread across his face by focusing very intensely on putting the wet ingredients into the bowl.

“It’s not really anything too special...” Akira studered out. 

“Well, let’s hope it’s at least enough for us to win this competition that you set up”

***

When their hour was up, Goro was filled with a mix of both relief and dread. He was of course relieved that the competition was over, but he dreaded what the final result would be. 

His and Akira’s cookies at least looked edible, at the very least they were something that he would eat, however he supposed that didn’t really matter with Yusuke being the judge of aesthetics. They also hadn’t taste tested anything while they were making the cookies, and he realizes now that that was probably a big oversight on both of their parts, but it wasn’t like they could do anything about that now. Well, at the very least, the cookies weren’t crumbling apart, so Sumire should go easy on them for the judging. 

Goro decided to steal a glance at Haru and Makoto’s cookies, and he realized immediately that he and Akira we’re probably not going to win the competition. 

Haru and Makoto’s cookies looked absolutely amazing, and he mentally berates himself now for forgetting that Haru owned a few cafes that sold homemade baked goods. The cookies somehow all looked like they had a perfect ratio of chocolate chip to cookie, and they looked to be very well baked as well. 

It wasn’t that his and Akira’s cookies looked bad, but they didn’t match up to the cookies that looked like they came right out of a cooking book. 

They were going to lose weren’t they?

Goro again must have either let disappointment or a scowl show on his face because he all of a sudden felt Akira start to comfort him again. 

“Goro,” Akira said while soothing him, “you know I couldn’t care less about actually winning right? I just wanted to give you a nice experience.” 

Goro sighs, “And I appreciate you doing that for me, but it seems my competitive spirit still gets in the way of me enjoying the small things in life.”

“Really hate losing don’t you?” Akira echoed a line from the past.

“I suppose so.” Goro chuckled, and Akira joined in with light laughter of his own. 

Suddenly, Futaba shouted over all of the tension between the two pairs of people.

“Alrighty bakers! The judges have done their jobs and brutally judged your cookies. Mwehehe time to see which one of you guys will crumble like cookies.Let’s start off with Sumire. Which of the cookies was more structurally sound. 

“Well, they both actually stayed in pretty good condition, however, Haru-senpai and Makoto-senpai’s cookies did fall apart just a bit more than Akechi-san and Senpai’s cookies, so I’m giving my vote to them!”

“You heard it here first people! Makoto and Haru’s cookies crumbled under the pressure, and the first point in the competition goes to Aekchi and Akira.” 

Well that was the only vote Goro thought they were going to get, so he was just planning to tune the rest of the results out, but Akira looked up at him with a hopeful look in his eyes, so he decided that he would listen just in case anything interesting happened. Futaba decided to continue with the results.

“Next up is what our resident artist, Inari, says about the aesthetics of the cookies.” 

“Well, my vote wholeheartedly goes to Makoto and Haru. The cookies were a precise shade of golden brown that made them very appealing to the eye, and the diameter of each cookie was just like the next all were perfectly wide and circular, and…” 

“And that’s enough from our resident artist! With absolutely no offense given to Akechi and Akira, Yusuke’s point goes to Haru and Makoto.”

Both of the girls were holding onto each other's arm, and gave the other a little excited squeeze when they saw that they had gotten a point. 

Goro realized that this was very cliche that it came down to the last point between the two of them, and he most likely knew that he and Akira would not receive it, but he couldn’t help himself when he felt a slight bit of excitement when Futaba started to speak again. 

“It’s down to the wire with one vote to go, and it comes in the most important category: taste! Let’s go ask our resident sweets expert who stole the victory away with their cookies' amazing flavor.”  
All eyes in the room turned to Ann expectantly awaiting an answer, and after what felt like an uncomfortably long time to Goro, she finally gave it. 

“Yeah I’m gonna be honest the choice really wasn’t that difficult.”

Yeah, Goro knew it. Well, at least he and Akira gave it their best shot.

“My vote without a doubt goes to Akechi and Akira.”

Wait...wait!

“What!” All four contestants declared at the same time. It seems Ann had some explaining to do to all four of them. 

“Well I could try to explain it, but it would probably be better if you just tasted the cookies for yourselves.” 

All of them walked over to the plate of Haru and Makoto’s cookies, and they split one of the cookies into four pieces and took a bite. 

They tasted remarkably bitter, but Goro really didn’t know why.

“Mako did you remember to put the sugar in with the dry ingredients?” Haru questioned her partner with a loving look.

At that moment, realization seemed to hit Makoto.

“Oh my! Haru I’m so sorry, I must have been so hyper focused on what ingredients went with which measurements that I completely overlooked sugar in the instructions.”

“It’s okay Mako! I’m not mad at all, and now we know what to remember to watch out for the next time we bake cookies together.” Haru said with a light smile. 

It was also then that realization hit Goro.

“I suppose Akira and I won then?”

Almost as if to affirm his questioning statement, Futaba spoke up again.

“Yup, yup! We have a winner because of a lack of sugar, Akechi and Akira have officially the better cookies.”

“Way to go Akechi! Didn’t think you had it in you!” Ryuji, as eloquent as ever, congratulated them.  
“While I very much appreciate the words of praise Sakamoto, I can’t help but feel that this is somewhat of an undeserved victory.”

Akira nodded his head in agreement with Goro. As much as they both liked winning, especially against each other, they also liked winning by their own skill and not a slip up from their opponent. 

Makoto and Haru seemed to turn to them with something akin to surprise. It was Makoto that spoke up for the both of them.

“Well I don’t know that I quite agree with you, I appreciate your words. I will admit though even though we lost, I did have quite a bit of fun.”

Haru nodded in agreement with her girlfriend, and Goro turned to Akira.

“So Goro, did you also have fun with ‘simply baking cookies’?”

“Hmm...you know just so you’ll stop pestering me about it I’ll say that yes Akira it was quite enjoyable.” 

They both knew that he was lying, and that Goro did actually really enjoy the evening of baking and competitions. However, Akira decided to again be difficult, though Goro supposed he might be the difficult one for making Akira go through all this work just to get him to bake cookies.

“Aww come on Goro you’re always so difficult when it comes to stuff like this.” Akira said with a knowing grin.

“Exactly my thoughts.” Goro replied laughing a bit to himself. 

“Really though, thank you Akira I did enjoy this quite a bit.” he said in a whisper to Akira.

“Anytime honey.”

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaaa this was pretty fun to write, but I wrote it over the span of a week with a break in the middle, so if it seem like there is a change in writing style, I apologize.
> 
> Also I'm very sorry and I swear I don't dislike Ryuji I feel like I just made it seem like I dislike him with how he was involved, but I swear I love him!!
> 
> One last apology for if any of the characters seem OOC.
> 
> Thank you very much for reading if you made it to the end.


End file.
